57 Fun Facts About William the Conqueror

In which Norman town was William born in 1027 or 1028?

Falaise: nine centuries on, Allied bombing destroyed two-thirds of his birthplace as a German army was trapped in the 'Falaise pocket' of 1944, though the castle on its crag survived.

What was the name of William the Conqueror's mother?

Herleva later married a Norman viscount, and the two sons of that marriage, William's half-brothers, rose to be among the most powerful men in his England.

By what unflattering nickname was William the Conqueror also known?

William the Bastard: his parents never married, yet before leaving Normandy his father made the magnates swear to accept the boy as heir, and they did.

William was a descendant of which Viking leader who was granted the lands around Rouen in 911?

Rollo: King Charles the Simple gave him the land in return for an end to his raids, and his followers' name, the 'Northmen', became 'Norman'.

William's father, Duke Robert I, died in 1035 on his way home from a pilgrimage to which city?

Jerusalem: he reached the city but died at Nicaea, in Asia Minor, on the journey back, and his only son, a child of seven or eight, became duke.

What happened to several guardians of the boy duke William?

They were killed: three guardians met violent deaths before he came of age, one of them, the steward Osbern, in the very room where the young duke was sleeping.

Which animals did the forest law William brought to England chiefly protect for the royal hunt?

Deer: the law put great tracts of country under special rules to guard the king's hunting, and the English resented it enough to put a verse complaint into the chronicle's obituary of him.

Which ally, later his enemy, helped William win at Val-ès-Dunes in 1047?

The King of France, Henry I, rode in to save his young vassal, then switched sides five years later and twice invaded Normandy himself, losing both times.

Whom did William marry in the early 1050s, gaining a powerful ally?

Matilda of Flanders brought William a mighty father-in-law: Count Baldwin V became regent of France for its boy king, so that border stayed quiet while he was away invading England.

What did William do when the pope forbade his marriage?

Went ahead anyway: Leo IX condemned the match in 1049, yet the marriage took place within four years, and peace with Rome apparently cost the couple an abbey each, built in Caen.

What kind of castle did William's Normans raise across England by the hundred?

Motte-and-bailey: a timber tower on an earth mound beside a fenced yard needed neither stone nor skilled labour, and the Bayeux Tapestry depicts William's men raising one at Hastings before the battle.

Which half-brother did William make Bishop of Bayeux around 1049?

Odo is the likeliest patron of the Bayeux Tapestry, which shows the bishop rallying troops at Hastings with a club; William later kept him in prison for five years.

Which childless English king appears to have chosen William as his successor in 1051?

Edward the Confessor had spent some 25 years in exile, probably mostly in Normandy, and his Norman mother was William's great-aunt.

In the Bayeux Tapestry, what is Harold touching as he swears his oath to Duke William?

Holy relics: Norman accounts said Harold swore on them to back William's claim to the throne, but no English chronicle of the time mentions his trip to Normandy at all.

Which neighbouring county did William conquer in the 1060s, claiming it through his son Robert's betrothal?

Maine: when its count died in 1062, William claimed it for his young son, who was betrothed to the count's sister, and marched in when the local lords resisted.

According to the chronicler William of Poitiers, what did the pope send William for his invasion of England?

A banner, as a sign of Rome's blessing, the chronicler says; after the conquest succeeded, papal legates came to England and ceremonially crowned William again at Easter 1070.

Which omen in the sky, shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, appeared over England a few months before William invaded?

Halley's Comet appears in the tapestry straight after Harold's coronation, and beneath it the border shows a fleet of ghostly ships, a hint of the invasion to come.

Three days before William landed, Harold beat which invaders at Stamford Bridge in 1066?

Harald Hardrada and Tostig were both killed: Tostig was King Harold's own brother, outlawed the year before, and he died fighting beside the King of Norway.

Where did the Norman fleet land on 28 September 1066?

Pevensey Bay: nobody opposed the landing, because Harold's army was far away in Yorkshire, and William's men came ashore beside an old Roman fort before moving on to Hastings.

Where did Harold pause for about a week on his march south to face William?

London: Harold had left much of his army in the north, and he pressed on to the coast with barely half of England's trained soldiers rather than wait for the rest.

On which hill did Harold's army form its shield wall on 14 October 1066?

Senlac: the English chronicle says only that they fought 'at the hoary apple tree', and the name Senlac comes from the monk Orderic Vitalis, decades after the battle.

Although it is called a tapestry, what kind of textile is the Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story of William's conquest?

An embroidery: its scenes are stitched in coloured wool onto linen rather than woven into the cloth, and the 70-metre strip only narrowly escaped destruction in the revolution of the 1790s.

What advantage did William's army have over Harold's at Hastings?

Cavalry and many archers: the two armies were about the same size, but Harold's men all fought on foot, and for much of the day their shield wall on the ridge still held.

What did William do at Hastings to kill a rumour that he had been slain?

Showed his face: he pushed back his helmet as his left wing was fleeing, and the English who chased it downhill were cut off and killed; the Normans later faked two more retreats to repeat the trick.

How does the Bayeux Tapestry apparently show Harold dying?

With an arrow to the eye, or so the scene seems to show; an early Norman poem instead has Harold cut down by four knights, the duke probably among them.

According to one account, what did Harold's mother Gytha offer William for her son's body?

Its weight in gold, and in that telling William still refused; where Harold was finally buried is unclear, though a church he had refounded later claimed his grave.

Whom did some English clergy and magnates nominate as king after Harold's death?

Edgar the Ætheling, a boy in his early teens and the last male of the old royal house, was never crowned; within weeks he and his backers had submitted to William at Berkhamsted.

On what day was William crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey?

Christmas Day 1066: when the congregation shouted its acclaim, the Norman guards outside mistook the noise for a riot and set fire to nearby houses, and smoke filled the abbey.

Which walled city in England's south-west, sheltering Harold's mother Gytha, defied William for 18 days in 1068?

Exeter surrendered only after costing William heavy losses, and he at once built a castle inside the old Roman walls to hold the city down.

In December 1069 William symbolically wore his crown where?

In the ruins of York: Danes and English rebels had just taken the city, so William paid the Danes to leave, kept the feast in the wreckage wearing his crown, then laid waste the country around.

What name is given to William the Conqueror's brutal campaign across northern England in the winter of 1069-70?

The Harrying of the North: his troops burned crops, herds and villages to starve out resistance, and the famine that followed shocked even chroniclers of the time.

What did William found on the site of his great 1066 victory as a penance for the dead?

Battle Abbey: William insisted its high altar stand where Harold fell, even though the first monks protested that the narrow, waterless ridge was no place to build.

Which Italian-born cleric did William make Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070?

Lanfranc had run William's own abbey in Caen; he took over when the Englishman Stigand was deposed, and under him Normans replaced nearly every English bishop.

Which local thegn joined the Danes at Ely and looted Peterborough Abbey in 1070?

Hereward the Wake got away when William's forces finally stormed the Isle of Ely in 1071, while his ally Earl Morcar was captured and imprisoned.

Under the peace of Abernethy in 1072, whom is the King of Scots thought to have given William as a hostage?

His eldest son, Duncan: William had marched an army deep into Scotland, and at Abernethy King Malcolm 'became his man', in the words of the English chronicle.

The 1075 revolt against William by the earls of Norfolk and Hereford was launched at what kind of event?

A wedding: the plot was hatched at the feast when the Earl of Norfolk married the Earl of Hereford's sister, and it collapsed so fast that William never needed to leave Normandy.

In which duchy, at the siege of Dol, did William's long run of victories come to an end?

Brittany: King Philip marched to relieve Dol, and William pulled out in haste, losing men, horses and treasure, his first defeat in the field.

What happened when William fought his rebel son Robert at Gerberoi in 1079?

William was unhorsed and wounded, by Robert himself it is said, and an Englishman, Toki son of Wigod, died bringing him a fresh horse; the king had to lift the siege.

According to Orderic Vitalis, what prank by his younger brothers sparked Robert Curthose's first revolt against William?

Threw water at him: playing dice in a gallery, they tipped it over Robert and his friends below. Historians think his real grievance was that his father gave him no land to rule.

The great stone keep William began at his London fortress is known by what name?

The White Tower replaced a timber fort that William's men raised in 1066 before he entered the city to be crowned; the stone keep followed in the late 1070s.

According to 12th-century chroniclers, William emptied 36 parishes to create which royal hunting ground?

The New Forest: historians now think the evictions were greatly exaggerated, as the land was poor and thinly settled, but the place did claim his son William Rufus, shot dead while hunting there in 1100.

Which language did William and his barons speak, making it the tongue of England's court for generations?

French: the Normans' own dialect of it replaced English among the ruling class, and English almost vanished from official records until the 13th century.

Which old English land tax did William keep collecting, usually at two shillings on every hide of land?

Danegeld began as silver raised to buy off Viking raiders; William kept it as a regular tax on land, the only one of its kind in western Europe, and could triple the rate in a crisis.

What was the great survey of English landholdings that William ordered in 1085?

The Domesday Book earned its nickname from the English, who likened it to Doomsday, the Day of Judgement, because there was no appeal against what it recorded.

According to one account, what gave William his fatal injury as he sacked the town of Mantes in 1087?

The pommel of his saddle, driven into his stomach when his horse jumped; another account says only that he fell ill. Either way he lingered for weeks at a priory outside Rouen.

What did William's youngest son Henry receive when his father divided his lands in 1087?

A sum of money, and no land at all: Normandy went to Robert and England to William Rufus, yet within twenty years Henry had taken both for himself.

What went wrong at William's funeral in Caen?

His corpse burst in the tomb when attendants forced it into a coffin made too small, and the stench drove mourners out; earlier a townsman had halted the service until he was paid for the land.

What was the only part of William's body to survive the ransacking of his grave in 1562?

A thigh bone: Calvinists scattered the rest during France's Wars of Religion, and the rebuilt tomb was wrecked again by revolutionaries two centuries later.

By Orderic Vitalis's account, what did William's nobles do the moment he died?

Rode off to secure their property: Orderic says servants then stripped the room and left the body almost naked on the floor, until Rouen's clergy sent it to Caen for burial in his Abbaye-aux-Hommes.

According to Orderic Vitalis, what did William try and fail to learn?

To understand English: Orderic says he wanted to hear his subjects' complaints without an interpreter, but he was past the age for study and too busy, so he gave up.

Which city, home of the royal treasury, did William seize before closing in on London in 1066?

Winchester: with the treasury and the Channel ports in his hands, William circled London, burning as he went, until the city's leaders rode out and submitted without a siege.

How was William described physically by contemporaries?

Burly and robust, with a guttural voice, and strong with it: he could draw a bow that other men could not bend, though he grew fat in later life.

What was irregular about Stigand, the archbishop Normans said crowned Harold?

The papacy rejected him: successive popes held that he had been put into Canterbury unlawfully while his predecessor still lived, so a crowning by Stigand would look improper; English accounts name Archbishop Ealdred instead.

What did some 17th- and 18th-century historians and lawyers call the oppression they believed William imposed on Saxons?

The Norman yoke: the phrase took hold in the 1640s, during the English Civil War, when radicals argued that the freedoms they wanted had been stolen from the English at the Conquest.

What became of William's son Robert after Henry captured him at Tinchebray?

Died a prisoner: Henry kept him locked up for 28 years, until his death at Cardiff Castle, and the battle put England and Normandy back under one ruler.

Whom did William's daughter Adela, mother of an English king, marry?

Stephen, Count of Blois, went off on the First Crusade and left Adela to rule his lands; after he died on a second expedition east she carried on ruling for their young sons.

Which kind of royal document, an Anglo-Saxon invention unknown on the continent, did William keep issuing as king?

The writ: Anglo-Saxon kings had used these brief sealed orders chiefly to grant land, and William kept them, using them for an ever wider range of royal commands.